Why watch brands keep doing collaborations

In March 2022 Omega and Swatch put a plastic Speedmaster on sale for around 260 dollars, and people fought over it. Not metaphorically. There were queues around the block in London, Tokyo and Zurich, scuffles outside boutiques, and stock gone within hours. A watch that cost a fraction of a real Speedmaster, with a quartz movement and a bioceramic case, became one of the most talked-about objects in the industry for a year. Three years later, in May 2026, the same trick worked again with Audemars Piguet, and this time the police used tear gas in Paris.

It is tempting to file these events under hype and move on. That misses what is actually happening. Brand collaborations like these are not accidents of viral demand. They are a deliberate, repeatable strategy, and once you see the mechanism, you see it everywhere. This is an attempt to explain why the most exclusive names in watchmaking keep making cheap watches with Swatch, what they get out of it, and why the trick seems to wear off a little faster each time.

The funnel

Start with the problem the industry will not say out loud. It is shrinking. Switzerland shipped about 14.6 million watches in 2025, the lowest figure in decades and roughly half what it shipped at the 2011 peak. The money has not vanished, but it has concentrated brutally at the top: watches over 50,000 francs now account for well over a third of all export value and almost all of the growth, while making up a rounding error of the actual units sold. Fewer people are buying watches, and the ones who are spend more on fewer pieces.

That is a quietly existential problem. If almost nobody enters the hobby at the bottom, who is left to buy the expensive watches in twenty years? A brand cannot sell a 40,000 franc Royal Oak to someone who has never thought about watches at all. It needs a first step, a way for a curious nineteen-year-old to own a piece of the name and start climbing. In marketing terms this is a funnel, and the collaboration sits at the very top of it.

Audemars Piguet has been unusually frank about this. Its chief executive, Ilaria Resta, described the Swatch project as a way to reach a generation the brand cannot otherwise touch, and put the target age startlingly low: the first apprentices Audemars Piguet takes are sixteen, and the collaboration is aimed at people even younger. The point, in her telling, is not the money from the plastic watches. It is recruitment. You give someone their first taste of the name at twenty, and you hope to sell them the real thing at forty.

The data behind this is real. Industry surveys consistently show younger buyers far more drawn to collaborations than older ones, and luxury houses have watched Generation Z start buying years earlier than the generation before. A collaboration is the cheapest, fastest way to put a famous name in a young person's hands and begin the relationship.

The halo

The funnel explains why brands want new young buyers. It does not quite explain why the trick works on everyone else, and here the mechanism is subtler. A cheap version of an icon does not cheapen the icon. It does the opposite. It reminds the whole market that the icon exists, and it sends some buyers straight to the expensive original.

The clearest evidence is Omega's own. After the MoonSwatch launched, sales of the real Speedmaster, the steel one that costs around 7,000 dollars, reportedly rose by more than half. People who came for the 260 dollar plastic version left wanting the genuine article, or bought both. The collaboration acted as advertising that buyers queued up to receive, and the parent brand sold more of its core product as a direct result. For Swatch the economics were extraordinary in their own right, with margins on the MoonSwatch estimated near ninety percent and the watch lifting the entire Swatch brand's turnover by well over half in a single year.

This is the halo effect, and it is the real engine. A brand spends nothing on conventional advertising, generates billions of social impressions, recruits young buyers, and sells more of its flagship, all from one accessible product. Seen this way, the only surprising thing is that it took the industry until 2022 to do it properly.

Nothing new under the sun

Because none of this is genuinely new. Swatch itself was the original accessible saviour. When it launched in 1983, the Swiss industry was being destroyed by cheap quartz from Asia, its global share collapsed from more than half to around fifteen percent. The plan was never to fight on price alone. It was to build a cheap, fun, high-volume base with Swatch, keep the factories and the movement-maker alive, and let the luxury names recover on top of that foundation. The man behind it, Nicolas Hayek, said plainly that the rescue would start with Swatch, not with Omega. The funnel is forty years old. The collaboration just makes it explicit.

The drop format is borrowed too, lifted wholesale from streetwear and sneakers. In-store only, one per person, no warning, gone in an hour. Supreme built an empire on exactly this, and the watch industry simply noticed it worked. The scarcity is manufactured, the FOMO is the product, and the resale market does the rest of the marketing for free.

Why the trick is wearing off

Which brings us to the most interesting part, and the reason this is worth watching rather than just enjoying. Each time the trick is repeated, the resale frenzy that follows is shorter. The market is learning.

The MoonSwatch held a real premium for months. Day one it changed hands for ten times retail, and it took the better part of a year to settle down toward its real value of a few hundred dollars. When Blancpain and Swatch ran the same play in 2023 with a plastic Fifty Fathoms, the premium was smaller and faded faster, and by 2026 those watches trade at or below what they cost. By the time the Audemars Piguet pocket watches arrived in May 2026, the collapse was almost immediate. Pieces that flipped for several thousand dollars on launch day were worth a fraction of that within twenty-four hours, helped along by Swatch itself reminding everyone, pointedly, that the watches were not a limited edition and that more were coming.

That acceleration is the whole story in miniature. The first time, buyers did not know how many would be made or how long the scarcity would last, so they paid almost anything. By the third time, they had learned that Swatch will keep restocking for as long as people keep buying, that there is no real scarcity, and that today's mania is next month's clearance. The arbitrage window that made flipping these watches profitable has narrowed from months to a single day, because the market now prices in the cool-off before it even happens.

None of this means the strategy has stopped working. It plainly has not. The Audemars Piguet collaboration revived Swatch's share price, drew a flood of new buyers to the secondary market, and put the Royal Oak in front of a generation that could never afford one. The funnel still funnels and the halo still glows. What has changed is the speculation layered on top, and that is the part worth ignoring. The brands are playing a twenty-year game about who buys their watches in 2046. The people queuing to flip a plastic watch for a quick profit are playing a twenty-four hour game, and the house has learned to win it.